In this free drum lesson, Jared Falk, from the DrumLessons.com team of instructors, takes you through five very cool sounding drum beats that include cross-sticking. These challenging drum beats are 16th note and 16th note triplet based, and feature lots of syncopation and broken hi-hat patterns. If you have patience and just keep working on them, with time, you’ll not only learn some slick drum beats but improve your cross-sticking technique tremendously.
Much like many free drum lessons on this website, going through them in a step-by-step approach will do wonders for your drumming. So even if you’re an intermediate drummer, we encourage you to start this series of free drum lessons on cross-sticking drum beats with the free drum lesson “Beginner Cross-Sticking“. That lesson will teach you some cool concepts and techniques on cross-sticking that you might not be aware off, as well as beginner drum beats that you can use for brushing up on your ability to play cross-stick based drum beats. If you’re a beginner drummer, we recommend that you to go through the lesson “Beginner Cross Sticking” before giving this one a whirl. Doing so will enable you to attain a solid foundation that you’ll be able to build upon with greater ease. Therefore, going through the beginner drum beats before the intermediate drum beats will help you avoid unnecessary frustrations.
With exercise #4 in this free drum lesson, Jared Falk shows how you can ghost note cross-stick strokes for coming up with a totally different feel. With that in mind, once you’re done with this free drum lesson, we encourage you to take this concept and apply it to the drum beats included in the free drum lesson “Intermediate Ghost Notes“. Going through the free drum lesson “Intermediate Opening-Closing Hi-Hats“ is a great idea as well, and will add a lot of cool little nuances to your cross-sticking based drum beats.